TOKYO (MacHouse) – Xcode is a great IDE application. But it has made us difficult to design application icons since it no longer supports ICNS files. Instead, you have to place 10 PNG files in the small squares of an AppIcon box, which can be painful if you end up redesigning the icon over and over again. So this icon issue has made JustTomato (an existing desktop application) near-useless.

These days, I’ve been thinking about upgrading JustTomato. I need a desktop application that lets me create icon files such that I can use them with Xcode easily every time I change icon design. And that’s how I have come up with justIcons 2, a successor to JustTomato.

justIcons 2 supports three different development platforms, letting you create icon files for all of them out of a single image. As far as the OS X platform is concerned, by default, justIcons 2 no longer generates ICNS files. Instead, the application will create a folder containing an AppIcon (.appiconset) folder with 10 icon files and a Contents (.json) file in it. So you can just drop this folder into the Images (.xcassets) folder of your Xcode project. Furthermore, on top of OS X and iOS, justIcons 2 also supports the watchOS platform and lets you create six different icon files for the 42mm screen.   Continue reading →

TOKYO (MacHouse) – Before installing new fonts, I sometimes wish that I could test them with some text. FontsView, an existing Mac App Store application, lets you view styled text with different fonts that are already installed on your computer. Well… Maybe, I can develop a new application that deal with fonts that are not yet installed. In fact, I submitted a new desktop application to Mac App Store a few hours ago. This new submission is called FontsView NIF Edition.

Most desktop applications out there work with fonts that are installed on your computer. By contrast, FontsView NIF (an acronym for not-installed fonts) Edition works with fonts that are not installed. FontsView NIF Edition lets you view styled text, using font files that you select, whether they are already installed or not. You can save styled text with the selected font as a picture or a rich text to your disk.

Since this application is largely based on FontsView 3, the initial release starts with v. 3.0.0.
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TOKYO (MacHouse) – It’s been almost a month since I released the last software title. I sometimes get lazy. Sometimes, I get depressed when I cannot come up with a new development idea. Oh, finally, I have something new. I submitted a new software title to Mac App Store more than 12 hours ago. This new release is called NewsRoll.

I often go to news web sites to keep myself updated with international news. Instead of going to this web site and that web site, what if I can read news from all those web sites that I regularly visit altogether? NewsRoll does just that. It’s a desktop application which is designed to extract news data (RSS feeds) from remote servers such that you can read horizontally-scrolling (right to left) news from multiple sources at a time.
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